


in fairy tales we women pay our dues

by Sunshine_and_Snow



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Female Matt Murdock, Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Male Elektra Natchios (I'm Sorry It's For Plot Purposes), Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 15:27:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14500005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunshine_and_Snow/pseuds/Sunshine_and_Snow
Summary: Matilda Murdock's life goes to hell on a Tuesday in February. Two weeks later, Foggy calls her about a client named Jessica Jones, and it only gets worse from there.





	in fairy tales we women pay our dues

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been having a rough time lately, finally watched the Defenders, couldn't sleep, and wrote this. 
> 
> I apologize in advance.

New York City experiences its first bad earthquake since 1884 on a Tuesday in February, not long after the end of Foggy’s last meeting of the day. Twelve hours later, he’s late to work because the train traffic on the ACE line is the  _ worst _ even on normal days, and doesn’t make it out of the terminal before his cell phone vibrates in his pocket. 

“Hello?” He answers without looking at the caller ID; it’s just Marci wondering where he is, he assumes, or maybe another co-worker giving him the head’s up the office is blocked off by potholes. That’s happening everywhere in Midtown and Uptown, supposedly.

“ _ Hello? _ ” says a woman’s voice, one that he doesn’t recognize, on the other end. “ _ Is this, uh, Foggy? Foggy Nelson? _ ”

Foggy slows as he reaches the street, and narrowly avoids knocking shoulders with a woman in a fur coat. “Yeah,” he says, and weaves through the crowd to find a place to stand beside a Starbucks. “Who am I speaking with?” At the new practice, no one calls him Foggy but Marci.

In the background of the other end of line, something beeps, high then low, and people chatter. There’s a noise like a loudspeaker droning, unintelligible. “ _ My name’s Sandra Thompson _ ,” the woman says. “ _ I’m a nurse at Metro General. Yesterday night, a neighbor called an ambulance for Matilda Murdock. Mrs. Advani said you’re the one to call. _ ”

For a moment, Foggy doesn’t know how to react. Doesn’t breathe. He removes his phone from his ear and sees the caller ID reads  _ Mattie. _ When he finally collects himself, he says, “Is—is she okay?” 

“ _ She’s unconscious. Mrs. Advani couldn’t come in. _ ” 

Kiya Advani lives in the apartment next to Mattie’s. She’s eighty-two, lives alone except for her cat named something Foggy can’t pronounce, and uses a walker if she needs to go down the hall. No, she could not go with Matilda to the hospital.

There’s also no reason why  _ she’s _ the reason Metro General knew to give him the call. 

“I’m coming,” he says, or hears himself say. These days, he and Mattie don’t so much as text, but he should still be her ICE.

“ _ Good _ ,” Sandra Thompson says as something behind her trills, and ends the call. 

Before heading back into the subway, he texts Marci. He calls Jeri. “My sister’s in the hospital,” he tells his boss and thinks, vaguely, that his heartbeat didn’t change at that. 

“ _ We have a meeting with McIver today _ ,” she says, unenthused. “ _ She better be dying. _ ” Like the nurse, she hands up without waiting for Foggy to speak, which is probably good. Given the opportunity, he doesn’t know how he’d answer that. 

A full hour later, because of the  _ fucking train delays _ , he stands beside an actual goddamn water cooler in an overcrowded ER with Sandra Thompson, though Mattie is nowhere in sight. The woman on the other side of the nearest pastel curtains acting as a temporary wall shushes her son, who wails because his ears hurt. Cots dot the hall. Nurse Sandra looks from Foggy to the direction of the patients and back again. She’s in her late fifties, by his estimate. Blonde, but greying. Something about the shape of her nose makes her look like she could be Karen’s mom. 

She looks like she could be Karen’s mom, and she’s saying, “Mrs. Advani wanted to check on her, and was worried when she didn’t answer. We think the miscarriage happened during the earthquake.”

Foggy’s thoughts stutter to a halt. “Miscarriage?”

Raising one pale brow, Nurse Could Be Karen’s Mom says, “Yes. Miscarriage. She’s in surgery right now. She was late in her second trimester, so not...everything came out.” 

There’s not a lot that he knows about miscarriages other it means the baby dies and, well, there needs to be a baby in the first place. These days, he and Mattie don’t so much as text. He knew Daredevil wasn’t going out because the media reported it, but.  _ But _ . 

But he hadn’t known his estranged kind of younger sister was pregnant. 

“When can I see her?”

For a beat, the woman says nothing. She glances him up over from his new shoes to his new haircut. Takes a lingering look at his hands before focusing on his face. “When Dr. Siskin’s finished,” she says, and folds her arms. “What’s your relationship to the patient, Mr. Nelson?”

His thoughts do that stutter again, and his heart jumps to his throat. Oh, he thinks.  _ Oh.  _ For the past two and a half years, ever since Mattie moved into her apartment, Mrs. Advani downright refused to believe the two of them weren’t together. 

“I’m her cousin,” he lies, and watches the tension leave Nurse Thompson’s shoulders. With a rush like this, no one in the hospital will bother to check if that’s true. 

“Do you know where the father is?” she asks, then pauses and continues, “Should we be contacting the father?”

“No,” he says. “No we should  _ not. _ ”

With a curt nod, she says all right, and directs him to a miraculously free chair in the waiting room. Two teenagers lie slumped on top of each other across from him, and next to them, an old man rubs a young girl’s shoulder as she leans over a utility bucket. There’s blood in her hairline. Looking around, Foggy realizes he’s one of the few people here waiting alone, and very, very desperately wants someone at his side. Unfortunately, calling anyone is an invasion to Mattie’s privacy when clearly she didn’t want this getting out anyway. Then he remembers that Mattie keeps everything a secret and listens to heartbeats without permission, so fuck that, and calls Karen. 

On the third ring, she picks up. “ _ Foggy? _ ” she says, voicing coming through tiny. It’s hard to hear her over the other people in the waiting room talking and the staff calling to each other, but he manages. “ _ Is everything okay? _ ”

“Yeah,” he says, because she means it about him and the earthquake, and then amends his statement. “No. Well, I’m fine, but—did you know Mattie was pregnant?”

“ _ What? _ ”

“I just found out,” he says, and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “I thought you saw her the other day.”

“ _ I did. _ ” Something creaks. “ _ I mean, she was in a sweater, but. How far along is she? How do you know? Who the hell’s the father? _ ”

The girl with the bucket retches. Looking away, focus turned now to the clock, he says, “According to the doctor? She was late in her second trimester. Karen—” He explains as briefly as he can, listens to the silence on the other end of the line, and sighs. “I don’t exactly need confirmation to guess who the father is. Can you come down here? I just. I can’t.”

“ _ I’ll tell my boss I need the day _ ,” she says immediately. “ _ Thanks for calling, Foggy. _ ”

Karen, whose office is closer to Metro General than his, arrives half an hour later, after Foggy’s already bitten all the nails on his right hand. “Still nothing,” he tells her when she asks if there’s news. Thankfully, ten minutes earlier the chair beside him, previously occupied by a wizzen old Korean lady with a sore on her leg, just opened up, so she takes a seat. 

“I swear,” she says, dropping her bag heavily at her feet, “that I had no idea. She didn’t even look it.”

“How the fuck is that even possible?”

Frowning, she says, “There was a woman at Union Allied who got hired pregnant, but she didn’t want anyone to know, right? So she basically starved herself so she wouldn’t gain weight ‘til she couldn’t hide it anymore. She only got tea when I interviewed her, but it’s Mattie, you know? It didn’t seem weird.”

“Well, fuck.” He runs his fingers through his hair. “So saying that’s what she’s doing, and it probably fucking is, then probably no one knows. Hell’s Kitchen’s not that big. We’d known if Eli was skulking around.”

Karen looks to him, head tilted in a way that’s almost Mattie-like. “Foggy,” she says much too slowly, “Eli’s dead.”

“What—”

Before he can finish, or even fully absorb the magnitude of what means, Nurse Sandra enters through the doors leading the main part of the hospital and calls his name. “Who are you?” she asks when Karen appears beside him, clutching at the strap of her shoulder bag so tightly her knuckles are white. 

“I’m his finance,” she answers, expression blank. The lie slips out too easily, or at least Foggy thinks, but it makes sense; that puts her and Mattie at almost related, which means the nurse can’t argue about her coming along. 

“Okay,” the nurse says, and turns heel. As they walk, she continues, “Miss Murdock woke about fifteen minutes ago—sooner than Dr. Siskin thought she would—but she’s still disoriented. There were no signs of recent physical trauma, so the miscarriage probably didn’t happen because she fell or because something hit her during the earthquake. Our best guess is that it was caused by stress. She’s underweight. The one answer we managed to get out of her is that she hasn’t been sleeping well. She was probably going to miscarry soon anyway. Does your family have a history of this, Mr. Nelson?”

“Not my side,” he says, distracted, because here he thought stress only screwed with pregnancies in books and movies. “How disoriented?”

“Bad enough that she tried to take the IV out of her arm.” They finally come to a stop in front of room  _ 106\.  _ “This is it.” She knocks twice, announces herself to “Miss Murdock,” and lets them in. Right before she leaves, she says in a voice low enough that no one but Mattie from that distance can hear, “Just be calming.”

“Foggy? Karen?” Her voice is weaker than Foggy’s heard in years after the door shuts, and he doesn’t get to the bedside fast enough to stop her from sitting. “You’re here?”

There’s a chair beside the bed, but he ignores it, and sits right on the edge while Karen hovers. “Yeah, Mattie,” he says, and tries not to think about how his heartbeat must sound. In the one-size-fits-all hospital gown, all five feet, two inches of her shrinks down to nothingness. Her hair, to her shoulders and shorter than last they saw each other, sticks up on one side. Swallowing hard, he says, “Your nurse gave me a call a few hours ago. I called Karen.” 

“How did—why—”

So that’s it, then. She really did remove him as her ICE contact. 

“Mattie,” Karen says, slowly taking a seat beside Foggy so the flimsy mattress sinks, “I’m going to give you a hug now. Is that okay?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer, but when she leans forward and wraps her arms around her, Mattie returns the gesture immediately. “I’m sorry,” she says into Karen’s shoulder, words muffled by her coat. 

Though she doesn’t specify what she’s sorry for, Foggy’s been deciphering Mattie Murdock speak since they were a couple of freshman in undergrad. “Don’t apologize,” he says. “I’m just...really glad the nurse called.”

“You can cry if you want,” Karen says, all low into Mattie’s messy hair, and to Foggy’s surprise, she does—quietly, her shoulders shaking. 

Oh, Mattie, he thinks as he looks at her back, at the ridges of her spine visible above the checkered hospital gown’s collar. What a goddamn tragedy. 

 

 

Matilda realizes she’s pregnant ten days after she buries Eli, so she takes three pills of over the counter melatonin and sleeps for twenty-four hours. 

“ _ I’m a Jedi _ ,” Luke Skywalker’s saying on the TV across the hall, “ _ like my father before me. _ ”

So it’s Thursday. That’s what her neighbors do every Thursday, watch Eighties movies. She thinks Luke Skywalker proclaims he’s a Jedi like his father before him in final one, but she doesn’t remember. Last time she watched it, her dad was alive and she could see.

She gets up. She takes a shower. Luke Skywalker screams. Darth Vader kills the Emperor and saves his son while she washes her hair. Lorena, the younger of the two women, murmurs to her girlfriend that this was always her favorite part. Katee with two ‘e’s laughs, and Mattie tries to filter out what she says next, to focus on Mr. Popovich above her instead as he badly practices his new flute. In the apartment next door, Kiya knits, her needles going  _ click-click. _

Mattie’s pregnant. Mattie is  _ pregnant.  _

And Eli’s dead.

“ _ You have six missed calls _ ,” her phone informs her when she taps it for the time, dressed now in yoga pants and a sweater. Foggy called her four times; Karen called her twice. Down in the alley below, a young man with a child’s fluttering heartbeat shoots heroin into his veins.

Halfway through telling her phone to call Foggy back, Mattie stops. She tries to imagine how the conversation will go—“Hey, Fog, so it turns out my ability to make poor life decisions is worse than I thought and now I’m pregnant. How’s your day going?” By now, she’s already told him to take the job with Jeri Hogarth and Marci Stahl. Karen took the job offer at the  _ Bulletin.  _ They both made it abundantly clear that Mattie’s not wanted right now. Besides, they shouldn’t have to deal with this. They’re both good people; even knowing what she can do, inevitably their brains with connect  _ blind  _ and  _ pregnant  _ and  _ dead  _ until they feel contractually obligated to help.

So she throws her phone back onto the bed, and ignores it the next time it rings, even if now it’s Stick. Fuck him too. Fuck Eli, even. Fuck the fact that she’s going to have to maintain the practice with a dead man’s baby growing inside of her. 

First she thinks, I could get an abortion. Then she thinks, But Eli’s  _ gone. _

Eli’s gone, and the last part of him left in the world is a baby Mattie did not fucking want.

She thinks about eating, and doesn’t. The thought of food turns her stomach. Instead, she takes more melatonin, and goes back to sleep. 

Life continues, somehow. The People v. Frank Castle trial was a disaster if there ever was one, but she’s still the only affordable lawyer in Hell’s Kitchen—probably all of New York City, except maybe Staten Island—so the clients come. She builds back a reputation winning civil and criminal cases alike. She sleeps more than she used to, and eats even less. She visits Eli’s grave to bring him irses, the flowers he once brought her. She doesn’t go church. She doesn’t answer her phone outside of clients. Two months in, the money comes through. Either in his last few weeks he changed his will, or she was written into it all along. 

Both options are depressing, and she can’t decide which is worse.  

Falling in love with Eli was never a choice for her. She was never in love before him, and she was never in love in the years in between, though she dated men and women frequently and indiscriminately.  _ Loving  _ Eli was all-encompassing; he lied to her, manipulated her, killed for her and despite of her, but their hearts always seemed to beat in the same rhythm. She could recognize him just for that, just for the way he breathed. When he kissed her, she didn’t wonder if she was better off dying. 

When they fucked, her world was cracking open and she was hurting and she was scared and he knew it and he still took her bed. They should’ve stopped after the first time, after the gala. They shouldn’t have done it even once. More than anything, they should’ve left Stick to deal with the Hand himself and run away together. They called Eli the Black Sky, reduced him to an object, their weapon, and still killed him trying to get to her. 

That’s the truth of it, in the end. A fertilized egg inside her is turning into a fetus beneath her skin, a process she can  _ hear _ , and the reason why this baby won’t have a father is because its mother didn’t do more.

So, skip. Life goes on, the weeks pass, she wins court case after court case, and then the earth shakes. She hasn’t slept in days, working hard on the most recent one, and she’s already feeling a little funny. The vibrating travels into her feet and through the rest of her body. Her drying rack, which was never secured to the counter, slides away from its place beside the sink onto the floor. The picture Foggy hung last year clatters from the wall. And when it still, Hell’s Kitchen starts screaming. 

_ I need to help, I need help _ —

_ I can’t _ —

There are two kids, a man below with a shotgun, and Mattie can’t move. She needs to help but she can’t, the baby won’t survive the fight, but neither will those kids without her, and the police aren’t coming, there are no sirens, there are sirens too far off much too far and she can’t breathe the air struggling to get into her lungs the volume rising her neighbors scared, and, and, and—

 

 

After Mattie’s allowed to leave, Karen brings her back to her apartment to spend the night. “You can stay more than just the night, if you want,” Karen says even as Mattie protests that she’ll be fine on her own, really, that they’ve done enough just coming to the hospital, “but you’re  _ definitely  _ staying tonight.”

“I’ll be all right,” Mattie says, and smiles thinly. She’s lying.

“No,” Karen says bluntly. “You’re not.”

What Karen doesn’t say is that the reason—or, not  _ the  _ reason, just one of the reasons—why Mattie’s here instead of home, or at Foggy’s, is because he still has a key to her apartment, which he’s currently using to go inside and scrub the blood off the floor. He’ll stay the night. Keep the windows open. Hopefully, that’ll air the place out enough not to kill Mattie with the smell when she returns. 

“I’ll stay on the couch,” she says, and walks into a door frame. Whatever drugs the hospital gave her aren’t out of her system yet, clearly. 

“My bed’s a full and we’re both adult women,” Karen says, leading her friend deeper into the apartment and shutting the door behind her with a gentle kick. “We can share. Do you want anything to eat? No, don’t answer that. I’m making soup.”

So she makes soup. Vegetable, with a vegetable broth and turmeric. One of her mom’s recipes that her brother used to like when he was sick. It takes a while, which is good. Right now, Karen doesn’t know what to say. 

Even so, she can’t keep what she really  _ wants  _ to say to herself for long. It comes bubbling out once they’re both seated and Mattie’s eating in that way that isn’t really eating. “Is this why you stopped answering your phone?” she says. “I mean, you and I were doing okay.”

Mattie blinks down at her soup. Her glasses are still somewhere in her apartment, and without them she looks younger, unguarded. After a minute she says, bluntly, “Yes,” and eats a spoonful of carrots instead of elaborating. She was always thin, but now her arms stick out, twig-like, from her tshirt sleeves. 

“You’re an idiot, Murdock,” Karen says. “What did you think I was going to do? What were  _ you  _ planning on doing?”  

“No one else needed to get involved,” Mattie says, still speaking to her dinner. Karen lets hers grow cold in her bowl. There’re bandaids on her friend’s arm, covering IV puncture holes overlapping old scars. It doesn’t take a lot to guess what conclusion the nurse drew about the situation, a pregnant blind woman all banged up with no boyfriend or husband in sight. Drawing her shoulders in, making herself smaller, Mattie says, “I don’t know. I was going to figure it out.”

“Figure it out.”

“Yeah.” 

Sighing, Karen says, “We’re not talking about a shadow organization flipping around the city—” Mattie flinches, hard. “Sorry. But the point’s the same. You shouldn’t have had to deal with this alone.”

“Well,” she says, “doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

Though Karen wants to ask if Mattie was going to tell them  _ ever _ , or if she was just going to conveniently disappear from court when she was too big to hide herself and wait for them to hear after the birth like everyone else, she withholds the question. She can save that for later, or never. Instead, she says, “You didn’t Foggy about Eli.”

“We weren’t talking,” Mattie says with a vague sort of shrug. “He never liked Eli anyway. You asked.”

Karen never saw the man, so unfortunately, everything he knows about him is from Foggy. “Eli Natchios is a car crash in human form,” he told her the day before Nelson & Murdock official split. “We were freshman, right? So I brought her to this party, thought it might be good from her, and lost track of her five seconds. Somehow she ended up meeting  _ him. _ I don’t know why they broke up, but. It’s just. He was an  _ asshole.  _ But you know what the worst part is? Why she never noticed? Because he’d just, I don’t know,  _ melt  _ around her. And—”

And what Karen knows about Eli Natchios is this: He was the son of a Greek diplomat, graduated with a degree in political science from Columbia, had a superiority complex the size of Russia, and looked at Matilda Murdock like she owned the world. Knowing that, of course Karen asked where he was. She tried calling for nearly a month before giving up, because she didn’t want Mattie to grieve alone. 

Clearly she should’ve have pushed harder. 

Mattie doesn’t finish her soup, but the bowl’s half-empty, so Karen decides that’s good enough for now. “You can borrow my pajamas,” she says as she gathers the dishes, refusing to let Mattie wash them. “Do you want to watch a movie or something? Netflix put up a few good ones. They might have audio description.” 

In the end, Mattie falls asleep on the couch midway through an episode of  _ Black Mirror  _ about mass murder and mechanical bees. Karen gets her awake long enough to put to bed, and reclaims her place on the couch, where she can finally text Foggy.  _ How bad? _

_ Bad _ , comes his immediate reply.  _ I think I cleaned everything.  _

_ How long did it take? _

_ A couple of hours. _

Karen shuts her eyes, takes a deep breath, and opens them again on the exhale.  _ She’s asleep _ , she writes.  _ I’m going to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow. _

When she crawls into bed beside her friend, Mattie’s eyes blink open blearily. “Karen?”

“Yeah?” 

“Thank you.”

With that, she rolls over, closing the possibility of a conversation. Karen leans over and turns off the light. 

 

 

“You just got out of the hospital,” Foggy says a week after Mattie’s miscarriage, standing in her new office. It’s smaller than their old one, significantly, and three blocks away, but nicer. No loose wires in the ceiling or telephone lines that refuse to work, though, like the last one, it’s laden with gifts of food and handicrafts. He takes this in all with one glance—she feels his hair swish as he moves, even if it is shorter—and says, “I think you’re allowed a break.”

“That last case wasn’t my only one,” she says leaning back against the desk. Her body’s sore. Yesterday she went to Fogwell’s for the first time in months. “I can’t just stop working. Shouldn’t you be doing that too?”

With a motion towards the window, to the outside she can’t see, he says, “It’s past five. I’m done for the day.”

The offices around her keep hours almost as irregular as her own, so she hadn’t registered the time. “Oh,” she says, and shifts her weight when he does. Every time Foggy moves, the stiff fabric suit crinkles. It sounds new. It sounds expensive. 

Splitting up Nelson & Murdock is probably the best decision he ever made. 

“Come on, get out of here,” he says after a moment. There’s a drag to his words and to his pulse, like he hasn’t been sleeping. “Let me take you to dinner, Mattie.”

“I don’t think Marci would like that very much.”

“Don’t be like that.”

They both fall silent. Sighing, Foggy reaches for the coat rack beside the door, and removes hers. “Come on,” he says again. “We can go to that Turkish that just opened up.”

“Okay,” she says, because she’s too tired to protest, and lets him slip on her coat. It’s well-worn, old. Even her dress is several years old, a soft one like a giant sweater that falls to her knees. Now that she thinks about it, Eli’s the one who bought it for her. 

As they walk, they talk about work, and she feels a vindictive sort of pleasure she’s quick to force down when he lets slip he misses the certainty of knowing his clients are innocent. She knows she shouldn’t, when she’s the one who told him to leave, but it comes regardless.

After all, she never was a terribly good person.

When they reach the restaurant, it’s nearly empty. The only other patron is a woman with expensive perfume and a heart murmur talking to a man who might be the owner, given that he doesn’t smell like a waiter. One of those comes over to take their order. He sounds middle-aged, with an accent that isn’t Turkish or New York and a rasp in his voice from smoking too many cigarettes a day. Foggy orders for both of them, sharing plates. It’s habit. She doesn’t comment, and neither does he.

Before he asks, “Is this why you pushed me towards HBC?” his heart beat picks up pace and sweat gathers on his palm. Across the room, the woman thanks the man for his service and stands to leave. Her bones creak. She doesn’t leave money, nor does he give her a bill. 

Automatically, Mattie files away anything recognizable about her for later. Just in case. 

“No,” she says, her hands curling together on her lap. “I just. They offered. You deserved it. Things seemed headed that way anyway.”

Foggy breathes out, sharp and quiet. “Things weren’t headed that way,” he says. “I was worried, Mattie, not mad. That trial was doomed from the start.”

“And I pushed us into it,” she says as the door opens and closes, the woman disappearing back out onto the streets. “It’s okay, Foggy, I get it—”

“Are you even listening to me?” Again, she quiets. He sighs. “Look, you were just too, I don’t know, rattled to make the closing statement. But this isn’t about the trial. Did you sleep? At all? That whole time?”

Shrugging, she says, “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” It’s a lie. She hadn’t. After ten years, she doesn’t need to say it for him to know that either.

“Your decision-making skills are already pretty bad,” he says, “but the second Stick shows up, they’re shot to hell.” He has you conditioned, Foggy’d said when she told him Stick returned. Added the cliche, He snaps his fingers, says jumps, and you just ask how high. Now, months later, when she doesn’t deny it, Foggy says, “How long was he here for?”

“Just until the funeral,” she answers. “Then he went, I don’t know. Somewhere far away, hopefully.”

“Hopefully.”

There’s a lull. The chain-smoking waiter brings over their food, post-smoke break. Carcegentics stick to the hummus and bread, but she still thanks him. 

“What do you plan on doing now?” Foggy asks, which means he’s asking if she’s going to go back out at night, but won’t be saying it directly. 

Frowning, she says, “I just want to keep working. Stay busy.”

“Is that really a good idea?” he says, and tilts his head. 

“Fuck, Foggy,” she says, freezing with her hand held midway out towards the bread. “It’s not like I was diagnosed with cancer. I’ll be fine.”

His heart beat speeds up again,  _ pit-patter _ . “You weren’t eating,” he says. Shoots back. “Probably weren’t sleeping. Or sleeping too much. You ignored me and Karen for months. The nurse said you miscarried because you were stressed. I think I’m allowed to say pushing yourself sounds like a shitty idea.”

“Well, what would rather I do?” she says, leaning back into her chair with her arms crossed. She can feel how thin she’s gotten, and she was never very big to begin with. After months of acute awareness of another person forming inside her, the absence leaves her feeling hollow. 

In a way, it was like losing him all over again. 

“Lighten your caseload?” Foggy says, like a question. “See a doctor?”

“A doctor?” she repeats. “What, like a psychiatrist? Yeah, that’ll go down great. What am I supposed to say, that I can—” She stops before she adds anything incriminating in public, though the staff is still in the kitchen. “Taking it easy is worse. I have more time to think.”

There’s a long pause before he says, “I can see about outsourcing some of our cases to you—”

“I don’t need your pity, Foggy.”

“It’s not pity,” he says. “It’s practicality.” Sighing again, he adds, “If you ignore us again, I’m letting myself into your apartment. I should’ve done it in the first place.”

Shaking her head, she says, “Don’t be guilty. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Don’t ignore us,” he says again rather than acknowledge that. “You might not be able to see a doctor, but you can at least see us.”

Stick always told her she had to cut ties from people and the comfort of materialism if she wanted to survive, but she also had miscarriage alone in her apartment during New York’s first damaging earthquake since 1884. Maybe there’s some truth in what Foggy said. That her old teacher says jump, and she just asks how high. 

“Okay,” she says, and he asks for her word on, she adds, “Okay, I promise,” because fuck Stick and fuck his war, she’s just so, so tired of being alone. 


End file.
